Mirko Biography
Mirko Basaldella (1910 – 1969) was born in Udine, Italy, on 28 September 1910. He grew up in a family of artists, studying in Venice and Florence with his brothers Dino, a sculptor, and Afro, a painter. He attended the Institute of Applied Arts in Monza, where he studied with Arturo Marini. At eighteen he took part in a collective exhibition with his brothers in Udine. In 1934, having moved to Rome with his brother Afro, he held his first solo exhibition at the Galleria della Cometa. In 1935 he was invited to represent the Roman School at the Venice Biennale. In 1937 he went to Paris and visited the Exposition Universelle, where he was able to see several turn-of-the-century avant-garde masterpieces. Although only partly taken by the work of the Surrealists, he was deeply influenced by Cubism, and his work from 1939 to 1945 showed evidence of a growing synthesis between his visual language and the modernist artistic threads of the early 20th century. During this period he was involved in several public commissions, the most important of which was the project for the doors of the Fosse Ardeatine mausoleum in Rome. In the early 1950s he traveled to the United States with other Italian artists and his artistic achievements were further recognized in 1955, when he was included in the exhibition A New Decade: 22 European Painters and Sculptors at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and new that year when it won first prize at the São Paulo Biennial. In 1957 he was appointed director of the design laboratory at Harvard University, Massachusetts, where he created monumental sculptures for private and public collections. In the meantime he spends the summers in Italy and participates in various group exhibitions. In 1954 he exhibited at the Venice Biennale and Peggy Guggenheim purchased some of his works for her collection. He received numerous awards, including the prize for sculpture at the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei in 1959 and first prize at the Rome Quadrennial in 1966. Mirko died in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on September 24, 1969.
